Semiotic Weakening Law in Ancient Chinese Writing System and Divinations

Abstract

Academic publications on Chinese semiotics are less numerous than those on Indo-European semiotics. This article shows the mantic practices in ancient China from the perspective of the semiotic weakening law. The evolution of hieroglyphic signs cannot be studied separately from that of mantic practices. The basic mental categories of Chinese mentality originated in mantic practices and were fixed in hieroglyphic writing. This study is an attempt to unravel the evolutionary peculiarities of Chinese mentality, i.e., how mantic practices evolved into philosophy which, in its turn, crystallized as the ancient canonical text of The Book of Changes. As the current scientific interest to linguo-cultural codes continues to grow, this research provides an insight into the nature of human mind and hieroglyphic signs, as well as promotes effective intercultural communication. The study relied on the principles developed by C. S. Peirce, C. W. Morris, S. G. Proskurin, V. P. Vasiliev, L. S. Vygotsky, Yu. K. Shchutskii, D. N. Keightley, etc. Hieroglyphs associated with fortune-telling practices were subjected to the methods of grapheme and etymological analyses, as well as the methods of description and comparison, to study the connection of mantic and hieroglyphic systems. The mantic system revealed a ternary structure and three stages of weakening, i.e., identity, similarity, and convention. The main links of the process included cracking (primary), interpretation (secondary), and fixation (tertiary). The hieroglyphic system reflected the transformations of mantic practices, which gradually turned into a philosophical tradition of reading trigrams and hexagrams. The correlation between the two systems made it possible to understand how primitive mantic practices had evolved into philosophy.